Last Updated on September 27, 2024

Picking the right keyword is a balance of Relevance, Search Volume, and Competition.

The following questions are to be asked when picking a keyword. They are in order importance with most important first.

  • Is the keyword very relevant to my business?
  • Will implementing the keyword cause the user to have a confusing or worse experience?
  • Is the intent of the keyword congruent with the product or service described on the page?
  • Does the keyword have a relatively large amount of searches?
  • How hard would it be to rank for this keyword?

These are things to keep in mind as you implement keywords on a page.

Relevance

Relevance is the most important factor in picking the right keyword. If you are doing SEO for a client who only sells running shoes it wouldn’t make sense to target a keyword such as, “provo men’s dress shoes”. This keyword may have many searches and low competition but it’s not relevant to the client. If you can’t find a keyword that has a lot of searches and low competition that’s relevant to the service, it’s better to pick a super relevant keyword if it has low search volume or high competition. Let’s say this one more time: relevance is the most important factor in picking the right keyword phrase.

Search Volume

Search Volume simply refer to how many people are searching for a specific keyword in a relevant location. You want to find keywords that have a high number of searches in the area the business services. If a client only services Provo, it wouldn’t make sense to target a keyword that has a high number of US searches but almost none in Provo.

Competition

It also wouldn’t make sense to target a keyword that has high Competition with large companies. If you were an Apple product repair service, it wouldn’t make sense to target the keyword “iPhone apple”. There are many large websites that already rank high for that keyword. If you wanted to show up for that keyword you would have to outrank apple.com, support.apple.com, bestbuy.com, gizmodo.com, appleinsider.com, and many others. It would be really cool to be able to rank for that keyword but it’s just not very likely to outrank those other sites. A good keyword could be “iPhone repair provo”. The competition for this keyword would be way less, and the keyword is more relevant to the service provided.

One way we look at keyword competition is with the keywords explorer on ahrefs.

Creating A Prioritized Target KW List

  1. Go to Search Console & find the client’s property you want to pull data from
  2. Select “Performance” in the left hand sidebar menu, sometimes you just need to select performance, some accounts require you to select “Search Results” under Performance. (This is great if you are looking for keywords for the site as a whole, if you are wanting to find a keyword for a particular page, be sure to filter to just that page).
  3. In the top right select “Export” – you can either export as a Google Sheet* or as a Excel Sheet
  4. Follow the steps in this video on how to organize and choose your top keywords – either save the keywords you choose in a properly labeled sheet in the client’s folder, or copy them over to the SEO Master in the appropriate place and if you downloaded as a Google Sheet, delete the unused sheet.
    • Video Instructions
      1. Sort by impressions from high to low & filter the column until you have about 10% of the highest search volume keywords left, or around 100-200 keywords of the highest search volume.
      2. Filter by position to only include keywords from position 3-20 (the first two pages of Google searches).
      3. You should be left with the “low hanging fruit” – keywords with a good amount of searches that will have the highest chance of making significant improvement either to page one or to the top part of page one – go through these keywords to determine relevance. If you are left with a sparse list, open up the filters a bit more to include more keywords on your list. This is a great starting point for some focus keywords for a pretty established site with plenty of keyword data.

* Be mindful of how many sheets you are creating in the Sebo Google Drive, we don’t want this to get cluttered. Please organize your documents in the proper folders and delete sheets you create that are not necessary.

As an MC or Marketing Assistant, you will be expected to be more thorough in your choice of keywords to focus on. Following are some steps to take in order to choose the best Keywords:

  1. Meet with client and discuss keywords
  2. Pick keywords based on what is most important to the client and how many searches there are
  3. Map those keywords to applicable pages
  4. Use SEO master to discover additional pages
  5. Combine SEO Master with mapped keywords discovered with the client
  6. Find additional pages that don’t have a keyword attached
    1. Use Search Console to find the keywords that page is already showing for.
    2. If none of those keywords are relevant use Keyword Planner to brainstorm additional keywords.

Remember that you shouldn’t sacrifice relevance or user experience for a high number of searches. If you come across a page that doesn’t have a keyword with a lot of searches, use a keyword that makes the most relevant sense. If possible implement a more generic keyword with the page’s keyword.

Example: CleanTelligent has a Reports page. There are no keywords similar to “cleaning report software” and the page does rank for “cleaning management software”.  Instead of using “cleaning management software” use “cleaning report software”. It is more relevant to the page and has the words “cleaning” and “software”, both of which are relevant to the overall company service.